I tell Noah he has to leave and promise to call him later. He agrees. But I won’t call. I’ll pack up my things, check out of the hotel, and go to another. I won’t remember Noah’s visit for a long time. And when I do, every last inch of me will burn with shame. Later still, I will finally be able to look beyond the shame and see how for those few hours, he remained with me, held my hand behind that hotel room door, and told me I was okay. That he loved me. And I will remember how convinced I was that night — as I had been every night with him before — that knowing what he knew, seeing what he’d seen, putting up with what he chose to put up with, he was the only one who ever could. The question I never asked was why.
Blackout
It is the summer of 2003, and through a series of extraordinary miscalculations and mishaps by the power company, New York City has lost electricity. Manhattan is dead and powerless on one of the hottest days of the year. I am walking down lower Fifth Avenue in a sea of bewildered office workers, shoppers, and students. My head is heavy and the late morning sun shines too brightly from the city windows and the chrome of gridlocked cars. I didn’t sleep the night before. I was up until dawn smoking crack and came home to find all the lights on in the apartment. Under the mirror, on the bar in the foyer, I find a note scribbled on the back of an envelope: 3:01am, Can’t take this. Noah has recently started checking into hotels when I don’t come home. Mostly he ends up at the Sheraton on Park Avenue South.
After a few useless hungover hours at the office, the power quits, the building goes dark, and I leave for home. As I make my way into the crowded street, I think this will be the last day like this. No more nights without sleep, no more Noah checking into hotels. All the gritty details from the night before flash through my mind as they always do. Something about crack, for me at least, will always heighten memory instead of erase it. I will never wake the next morning and forget what I did the night before.
I am barely aware of the mounting crisis of the blackout around me — I’m much more concerned with how to appear rested and loving when I see Noah. As the frantic pedestrians shuffle in herds through the middle of Fifth Avenue, I worry how I will persuade him that this day marks the end of the lost nights, of which there have been too many to count. I believe this. Even though the memory of every morning like this over the last three years — and the memory of believing each one was the last — sits like a toad in the path of my new plan, I still believe, again, that this time will be different. That the old tenacious pattern will be broken.
I know that if the power returns before evening, we’ll go to the Knickerbocker. I won’t drink. Or I will drink, but only wine. Just one. Or probably two. Talk of the power failure and ensuing chaos will distract us from the horror of the night before. I’ll threaten to leave when the conversation drifts to What can we do about this? or You’ve got to get help. After a few beats of hard silence we’ll talk about the waitress with cancer, how brave she is, how hard she works, how cool the clothes she sews and wears to work are. I’ll watch her shoulder through the thick bar crowd with heaping trays of steaks and drinks and wonder if ordering a third glass of wine will provoke Noah into more talk of rehab, outpatient services he’s researched, AA. I’ll be thinking about just exactly how much I can get away with drinking right now without causing a fuss as the waitress brings us our burgers and fries. This will be the only thing on my mind—one more—as she describes the chemotherapy and the exhaustion and the sour stomach and hair loss. You’re amazing, I’ll say as I tap the glass and nod for another, avoiding Noah’s glare on the other side of the table. And in a flurry of possibility I’ll say, Actually, make it a vodka. I won’t look his way as I jump up for the bathroom, wondering whether or not he’ll be there when I return. When I do, he will be — he always is — and in tears. His pleading for me to stop drinking and get treatment, and my threatening to leave — the restaurant, his life — will continue. Silence will eventually follow, the busy restaurant buzzing around us, a TV star in the corner with her husband, someone from publishing in the next room, several regulars leaning into their cups at the bar. These are our nights at the Knickerbocker. So many nights. But this night, the night of the blackout, will not be one of them.
In the sea of people swarming the streets, suddenly: Noah. He’s walking up Fifth Avenue and he sees me just as I see him. I am with my assistant and the rights director from the agency, which is a comfort because I don’t want to be alone with him. I don’t need to look at his face to know that he’s furious. He barely says hello to them and to me he says, Let’s go. His grandmother is in her apartment on the seventeenth floor of the Sherry Netherland and we need to go to her. Now.
I tell him I’ll see him there later, and right in front of my colleagues he says, No way, come with me now. I say, Relax, and he says he will once I come with him. I say good-bye to my colleagues, and instead of making a scene I start walking back up Fifth toward the Sherry. I walk ahead of him nearly the entire way uptown, from 14th Street to 58th. The city is a mess, and because of the fresh memory of 9/11, there is a sense of something bigger than a power failure going on. Rumors of terrorists blowing up power plants ricochet through the streets. The air is thick with calamity.
As we near the Sherry we find a gourmet food store. The fancy kind that caters to the people living north of 57th and south of 60th between Fifth and Madison. They sell wine and even have a machine that chills it instantly that, because a generator has been hooked up, still works. The store is dark save for a few candles, and the owner’s wife stands near the locked door and is careful about who she lets in. Noah puts a bottle of Sancerre on the counter, and I grab three more. I do this in front of the shopkeeper intentionally so that Noah can’t object. He just shakes his head slowly and when he pulls for his wallet, I hand him four twenties. We load up on things like roast chicken, crackers, and cheese and make our way around the corner to the Sherry.
The building is mainly residential but also has hotel rooms. There are porters and bellhops and managers all over the lobby as we enter and explain that we are there to see Noah’s grandmother, or as everyone calls her, Neeny. They recognize us, and one of them escorts us to the stairs that they have lit, on the landings, with candles. Before heading up the stairwell I stop at the lobby mirror to make myself presentable, hide the sleeplessness and hangover. I pat my hair into place, wipe the sweat from my face and brow, tuck in my shirt. Luckily I have some Visine, so I squirt both bloodshot eyes with the stuff and hope that in the dim light Neeny won’t be able to see them, or any of me, too clearly.
The stairwell is muggy and hot, and the light flickers against the green-and-gold wallpaper. In this shimmery dark it feels as if we are underwater, moving in slow motion, safe. I am exhausted, but the muffled footfalls and muggy air are calming. We are lugging sacks of wine and groceries in a gilded tunnel with light dancing on our skin. The dread from before starts to fade, and when Noah turns on the landing to see if I am still behind him, his eyes are shining with candle flames and are kind again.
We drink and eat with Neeny, touch each other on the arm affectionately as we animate stories of our vacation in Paris, Noah’s movie, and my job. I imagine what Neeny would think if she knew that I had been smoking crack in a project on the Lower East Side the night before, in an apartment with four bolts and a steel bar across the door frame. I imagine her face falling as someone tells her. I drink more Sancerre, glass after glass, and let the tide of wine muffle the exhaustion and the creeping shame. I watch Noah amuse Neeny, flatter her, gently walk her through the dark apartment to her bedroom after dinner, stroking her back as they go. I watch them and love this part of him, this tender part that is so devoted to, and comfortable with, his family.